The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “But I told her that when the child was born, I wanted to ‘borrow’ that child for just a few years during her crucial upbringing to attempt to bring her up as I had brought up Annie herself, protected from all the trammelings and warpings and frustrations of society, showing her the grand world of nature and the ways that she belongs to it.

  “That was my bargain with Annie, but she has reneged. It has been three years now since the baby was born. I am almost seventy years old. I am beginning to lose hope.”

  Dawny possessed a large vocabulary but he told Latha he didn’t know what “reneged” means, and neither did Latha, but they assumed it meant that Annie had changed her mind about letting Dan take the little girl Diana. Latha wished there was something she could do to cheer up her friend Dan. She had already given him the contents of her store, but that was just material goods. She baked a vinegar pie and had Every drive her out the Butterchurn Holler road to Dan’s house, where they both visited for a while with Dan. Latha brought him up to date on her grandchildren, including the new one, who was a boy. But Dan seemed to be in a deep depression, and told them he might go away for a while. Go where? Latha asked. Oh, just off somewhere for a little while, he said.

  On the way home they were pulled over by a state police cruiser, driven by their neighbor, Corporal Sugrue “Sog” Alan, the same ruffian who in his earlier days had been the school bully and had broken Dawny’s arm.

  “What’s up, Sog?” Every asked.

  “License and registration,” Sog said.

  “Hell’s fire, Sog!” Every said. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Sir, license and registration,” Sog said again.

  “Latha, fetch me that piece of pink paper out of the glove compartment,” Every said to her, and then he said to Sog, “I think I must’ve left my license in my other pants.”

  Sog began writing him a ticket. Latha thought of how Sog had left Stay More to serve in the Korean War, but returned home to live in the family house (his parents and sister had gone to California), a house that was the nearest neighbor to Latha’s store and post office. It made Latha nervous that Dawny was living there in such close proximity to his former assailant, but Dawny was big and tall and strong and told Latha he had no fear of Sog Alan.

  Latha spoke up, “Do you mean the only thing he’s done wrong is driving without his license?”

  Sog stared at her with his mean little eyes. “No’m,” he said. “You folks have been to see the old hermit feller, right?”

  “He’s not a hermit,” Latha said. “He just prefers his own company.”

  “Did he have anyone else’s company while you were there?” Sog looked back and forth between the two of them.

  “Just ours,” Every said.

  Sog sighed. “My wife Fina has turned up missing.”

  Latha knew that Sog had a wife named Serafina, who had a five-year-old daughter named Brigit whose father had been killed in Korea. Latha had seen them a few times; Fina didn’t look much older than five herself.

  “You’uns aint seen her? I reckoned she might even have took the girl and gone to your place just to get away from me.”

  “Sorry, Sog, we haven’t seen them lately,” Every said.

  Sog did not give Every the ticket. “You ought to have your license on you whenever you drive,” he said, and got back in his cruiser and took off.

  “That boy makes my flesh crawl,” Latha said.

  “I hate to see folks leaving Stay More,” Every said, “but I’d sure be glad if he didn’t stay any more, and it’s good to learn that his wife and kid have already lit out.”

  They did not see any of them again for several weeks, until one day in late May several state police cruisers and the sheriff’s and deputy’s cars came into town. Sog appeared at the dogtrot, accompanied by an FBI agent, and said he needed to question Latha and Every, because that hermit had done gone and kidnapped the daughter of his daughter.

  “Do you mean Brigit?” Latha asked.

  “Naw! I don’t know what became of them. I’m not talking about Fina’s daughter. I’m talking about Annie’s daughter. Her name is Diana Stoving, and she’s not but three years old, and that fucking hermit went all the way down to Little Rock and stole her.”

  “Well, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of ’em,” Every said. “Have you tried looking at Dan’s house?”

  “I may look stupid,” Sog said, “but I got more sense than that. That’s the first place we thought to look, and the bastard shot at two state troopers and three sheriff’s deputies getting away from there. None of ’em was kilt, luckily, but he shore slowed us down.”

  The search for Diana Stoving became the biggest event in Stay More’s history since the ceremony of Gerald Coe’s posthumous award of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bloodhounds were brought in, and it seemed the searchers scoured every inch of the countryside. Annie and her husband Burton Stoving came to town in a Cadillac, and Stoving offered a reward of ten thousand dollars for the safe return of their daughter. He later raised that to twenty. It seemed at one time there were more strangers in town than there had been during the Army tank maneuvers during the war, and if Latha’s store had been open she could have done a thriving business. Latha had mixed feelings about the kidnapping. She sympathized with the girl’s parents, but she remembered that she had once determined to kidnap Sonora away from Mandy if she had to. And she remembered Dan’s offer to kidnap Sonora. Personally, asking herself where she would have gone if she were Dan, she hoped he had taken the child somewhere away from Stay More. Dawny and Latha put their heads together and concluded that the glen of the waterfall would be a great place for Dan to hide out. “But would Sog Alan think to look there?” Latha wondered. Dawny winced and said he hoped not. They swore each other to secrecy. They agreed that growing up in the Ozarks would be better for the girl than growing up in Little Rock. They planned, if the law officers were not successful in finding Dan and the little girl, to take some food and blankets up to the glen of the waterfall.

  But on the third day of the massive manhunt, word came down that Dan had been seen and shot twice by a corporal of the state police named Sugrue Alan. The little girl was found unharmed and taken to her relieved parents. Latha questioned Sheriff Flud and learned that the searchers had been under orders not to kill but to capture, and ole Sog had been alone at the time so nobody knew if he’d violated the orders or not, but that he claimed he’d got the drop on Dan and ordered him to lay down his arms and surrender but Dan refused so he shot him twice. Doc Swain, inspecting the body as the local physician, said that any fool could see that Dan had been shot in the back and it wasn’t very good shooting, either, because it took Dan a good long while to die. There was a legend that as a young man in St. Louis, Doc Swain had revived a corpse, and he spent a long time with Dan’s body but apparently wasn’t able to get his pulse or breathing started again.

  They didn’t bury him in the Stay More cemetery because it was argued that that sacred ground was reserved for Stay Morons and despite the twenty years Dan had lived here he didn’t qualify as a “residenter.” He was buried up on the hillside above his yellow house, on his own property, or, rather, the property of whoever owned that land but had never objected to Dan building his house on it. Mother Nature doesn’t care whether you’re a Stay Moron or not, and She drenched the funeral with a downpour, but the few in attendance didn’t mind getting soaked in tribute to poor old Dan. Every had one umbrella, which he held over Latha while she read a poem from one of the few books she had found in Dan’s house, an anthology of Elizabethan poetry. It was called “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” by John Donne, and Latha did not cry until she got to the last verse:

  Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

  Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;

  Thy firmness makes my circle just,

  And makes me end where I begun.

  Through her tears Latha insisted that the few in attendance honor the departed with all four stan
zas of “Farther Along.” From Dan’s yellow house just down the hill came the unmistakable sound of Dan’s fiddle, accompanying them through all four stanzas and repetitions of the chorus. Every handed the umbrella to Latha and ran down to the house to investigate, but tripped on a tree root and fell hard. Latha ran to join him. He was all right; he’d just had all the wind knocked out of him. Together they listened to the fiddle music, then went inside the house, where they found Dan’s fiddle, but nobody was playing it. Latha couldn’t escape feeling while she was in the house that Dan was still there, and it spooked her. They returned to the grave, which was rapidly filling up with water, and finished the singing of “Farther Along” while the fiddle music went on and on. Every asked her, “Shouldn’t I say a prayer or something?” She shook her head. They began shoveling dirt atop the coffin in the grave, and the rain came down harder. Thunder started crashing all around, and they ran for their cars. A bolt of lightning zipped out of the sky and struck Doc Swain with such force it reduced him to ashes.

  Latha wanted to die. She held her arms wide to the sky and yelled over the sound of the thunder, “Hit me too, goddammit!” Every had to drag her to their car, and she cried all the way to Parthenon, their car slogging and slithering through the mud, where there was a telephone that Every could use to call the coroner about Doc Swain.

  It kept on raining throughout Doc Swain’s funeral, two days later. What remained of him was put in a canister and buried beside his beloved Tenny Tennison in the Stay More cemetery, in a plot over which Doc had erected a double headstone many years before. Despite the downpour, quite a lot more people attended Doc’s funeral than had been at Dan’s. Coming from all over were Swain relatives and former patients and dozens that Doc Swain had delivered into this world and former students at the Newton County Academy, where Doc had taught for several years as a young man. Doc’s first wife, Piney Coe Swain, also showed up, the first time Latha had seen her since Piney had left Stay More after catching her husband with Tenny. There had been rumors that Piney had been working at a store in Harrison, and that she was seen visiting her sister Sycamoria in Demijohn. Latha wasn’t sure that Piney would remember who she was, so she introduced herself and explained she was one of Colvin’s best friends and patients.

  “We all loved him,” Latha said.

  “He was an easy man to love,” Piney said.

  “And he had plenty of love to give,” Latha said. “Too much for any one woman.” Latha told Piney that over the years Doc had told her the whole story of himself and Piney and Tenny, who was the love of his life but not to the total exclusion of Piney, for whom he had carried a torch until his last thunderstorm. Piney’s eyes began to seep teardrops, and throughout the brief ceremony, which consisted of a reading by former Rev. Every Dill of some passages in the Bible having to do with life everlasting, plus the singing of “Farther Along,” and then the traditional sprinkling of handfuls of earth over the coffin or rather canister by each person present, Latha and Piney sat together and held hands. The funeral feast was held inside the schoolhouse, the only building that would accommodate all those people in out of the rain. Latha told Piney she might as well take any of Doc’s belongings that she might want, except for his journal and other papers, which should be sent to a major library, since it was commonly rumored that Doc had conducted experiments which led to the discovery of streptomycin, which helped eradicate tuberculosis.

  Piney took a couple of Doc’s shirts, but she did not want his medical and lab equipment, which remained in the house for kids to play with for a number of years. Nor did Piney want Doc’s dog, or rather pup, Galen (actually Galen XIV, the last in a long line of Doc’s dogs by that name), so Latha persuaded Every that they needed a dog on their property, but she couldn’t persuade her countless cats that they needed a dog, and the poor pup had a hard time of it for nearly a year before the cats accepted him as one of their own.

  Before she left, Piney pointed out to Latha that there was a vacant spot of earth on the other side of the double headstone that Colvin shared with Tenny, and she wondered if it might be possible to reserve it for her own burial. Latha pointed out that Stay Morons had always been very strict about keeping the cemetery free of “furriners.” Piney countered by pointing out that her family, the Coes, related to the dozens of Coes already in the cemetery, had lived on the far south side of Ingledew Mountain, which was well within the township limits of Swains Creek township, and Piney had never stopped thinking of herself as a Stay Moron since the day she’d first met Colvin Swain and he had cured her of hookworm. The problem was that the sexton of the cemetery, in charge of such matters and the reservation of burial plots, happened to be Colvin Swain, deceased. But Latha discussed it with Every and he discussed it with the older Ingledews, and it was decided that Piney Coe Swain could indeed have the resting place to Colvin’s left, beside him, and thus, like Jacob Ingledew, who lay interred between his wife Sarah and his mistress Whom We Cannot Name, Colvin would have an heraldic grouping through eternity.

  Latha was too stunned by the double deaths of Colvin and Dan to be depressed, just yet. Her main desire was to take a gun and shoot Sog Alan. They searched Dan’s yellow house for a will, but couldn’t find one. The walls of the house were covered with his writings, in the same elegant script as the notes he’d written for Dawny. The writings were about Nature, philosophy, life, love, and his blessings and damnings toward humanity. He had left few books or anything of value, and the contents of Latha’s store which she had given him were still pretty much intact. Annie had had her own room, which was nicely decorated and still had a few of her toys and dolls in it. Latha gathered these up and mailed them parcel post to Annie, with a note suggesting she might want to give them to her daughter Diana.

  Doc Swain’s house and clinic contained nothing much of interest or value, apart from his medical and lab equipment, and various items that indigent patients had bartered to pay off their medical bills: perishable foodstuffs like eggs and bacon and flour, hundreds of jars of canned fruits and vegetables, and an assortment of rings, other jewelry and pocketwatches. A woman named Rowena, who had been Doc’s nurse until he no longer needed one for lack of patients, came and hauled off most of this stuff, including his kitchen equipment. But enough remained that my sisters and I, as well as Jelena, and Vernon too when he was able to walk, could spend a whole day playing “doctor” inside the clinic. Sometimes Latha would join us, and pretend to be our patient. She had been careful to remove all the real medicines from Doc’s supply, so that none of the children could dose themselves or each other. Latha took Doc’s best leather Gladstone bag and filled it with his journals and papers and shipped it off to the University library in Fayetteville. Several weeks later she had a nice letter from Dawny, who said that he had a part-time job in his freshman year working in the library, and he was helping with the sorting of Doc’s papers and was thrilled to see them and read them.

  Doc’s house and clinic went on the real estate market and remained there for years and years, but nobody bought it. Likewise, Dan’s nice, sturdy, golden yellow house failed to find a buyer. Latha wondered if Stay More was really dying. As superstitious as always (and with good reason in the face of such things as mullein stalks), Latha believed devoutly in “the rule of three”: whenever anything of significance happens twice, it is bound to happen one more time. This can apply to household mishaps as well as calamities: things always happen in threes, including deaths. The deaths of Dan and Doc made only two; now one other person was fated to die, and the possibility greatly perturbed her. She didn’t fear that it might be herself. All of us believe, or hope, in our own immunity to death. Dawny in his book called Lightning Bug, written to her, had promised her immortality. But he hadn’t promised it to Every. Could it be that Every would be the third in the set of three to die? She begged him to stay home and not go to work, but he tried to reason with her and said that he had some cars at the Ford shop in Jasper which nobody else but him could fix. She told
him to be extra careful whenever he left home. Since one of Doc’s last jobs before his death was listening to Every’s heart and saying it had a peculiar rhythm to it, Latha urged Every to find a doctor in Jasper.

  But Every’s heart would hold out for some years. A heart that wouldn’t was that of Piney Coe Swain. It just stopped one day, and her sister Sycamoria, with whom she lived, notified Latha. They dug another grave so close to Doc’s grave that the canister holding his ashes was accidentally struck by a shovel and knocked open, spilling some of his remains into Piney’s grave. Every read the same passages of the Bible that he had read at Colvin’s funeral, and for the benefit of the few in attendance, including her sisters Dogwoody and Redbuddy as well as Sycamoria, he explained that not only was the burial up against Doc’s according to the departed’s wishes, but also Doc himself would have approved of it, and he who had administered so many “dream cures” in his fabulous life was now going to meet in his eternal dreams both Tenny and Piney, who, God willing, would always love each other too. Amen.

  Chapter forty-three

  I don’t remember attending any of those funerals. Gran tells me that I attended all of them, and it was right after the one for Piney Coe Swain that she took me by the hand for a guided tour of Stay More, my earliest memory. Why would I remember the latter but not the former? Maybe I was too young to know what a funeral was; more likely I had no idea of the significance of Doc Swain, Dan, or Piney. Most likely I had even then a great disliking for death and anything associated with it. I had a great interest in watching my baby brother Vernon grow up, and it must have pained me to imagine that someday they would have a funeral for him too. My sisters, like my father, considered me superfluous, even freakish, like a sixth finger, and I think I must have been glad when Vernon was finally born and took away their resentment of me. Of course I was fascinated by that polyp sticking out of his groin. Daddy called it his “tallywhacker” and when Vernon was four and had begun to misbehave, Daddy threatened to cut it off unless he behaved himself. I must say that gave me pause. Had I once possessed a tallywhacker too but misbehaved?